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Violence against women is now well recognized as a human rights violation and public health problem of worldwide significance, with far-reaching impact on the mental and physical health of women. The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defines this issue as: “…any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual and psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life”. Here, the term ‘gender-based’ is used to lay emphasis on inequality between men and women. There are several causes of violence against women because of patriarchal norms, economic restrictions on women, religious believes and norms and other reasons.
Current Scenario: Violence and Sexual Abuse of Women in Latin America
The situation of women in Latin America is pitiable. Women in Latin America have faced various kinds of violence such as torture and rape under the military dictatorships or during the civil war and femicide. Machismo way of thinking is a major factor that contributes to domestic violence and violence by an intimate partner. It emphasises on the superiority of masculinity of males and disregard of women by declaring them subordinate and secondary to the needs and wishes of their male partners and considering them as a tool for sexual pleasures and caretakers of their families. Another factor that has led to a considerable increase in cases of sexual and physical violence against women in Latin America is armed conflicts and dictatorship regimes. Even though armed conflicts kill and harm more men than women because most of the combatants of war are man, armed conflicts also have many indirect consequences on the health and survival of women.
The law-and-order situation hits rock-bottom because of armed conflicts. There is displacement of civilians along with a subsequent increase in all forms of violence. Due to displacement, there is tension and a feeling of powerlessness among the male members because of loss of traditional roles of male dominance. This tension is manifested in an increased incidence of domestic violence against women. Economic exploitation of the citizens leads to a psychological effect on the behaviour of men as the economic independence of men is taken away and this in turn, have an aggravating effect on the social issue of violence against women. This economic exploitation pushes many women and young female children into sexual slavery and pornography. The other forms of sexual violence include sex trafficking of women for service in military brothers or other forms of sexual slavery, violence against women to get hold of enemy intel, indiscriminate rapes of women by the military, etc.
The Initiatives of International Organizations and Conventions to Resolve this Issue
In countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay, women activists and their partners faced both mental and physical torture. The major social perspective involved in such an act was the consideration of women as infant bearers and objects for sexual pleasure and for attacking the family honour and enemy men. This not only impacted their physical health by causing the spread of HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancies but also their mental health as their families were destroyed and they were forced into sexual slavery. Brutal and heinous acts were committed against women in Columbia, where they were made to bear innumerable and miserable acts of physical and sexual tortures. The acts of physical tortures include hours of beating and subsequent malnourishment, getting ripped into pieces by a chainsaw, ripping apart of bellies of women to cut their foetuses after they were raped, getting gang raped by military men and many other brutalities that symbolise the shallowness of human desire to attain power .
Violence against women is a serious issue and a barefaced violation of human rights. Even though more than fourteen countries in Latin America have made feminicide a crime and has also passed laws and amendments to their penal codes such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, but still there are a number of challenges in the path of these countries to achieve a comprehensive and sustainable approach to resolve these issues. Between 2014 and 2015, the UNDP Gender Regional Centre for Latin America and Caribbean, in collaboration with the regional UN Women Office and the Millennium Development Goals fund, carried out the first regional screening and mapping of policies and national action plans to combat violence against women in 32 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. The report titled “From Commitment to Action: Policies to End Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean” was published after the completion of mapping and screening and has served as a highly valued technical and political tool to enable states to meet the goal of eradicating violence against women.
The countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have passed several laws to protect and promote women’s rights. The laws which are first of their kind and were passed in the 1990s are known as ‘first generation laws’. These laws include Law 11.340 “Maria Da Penha Law” (2006) in Brazil that regulated the illicit drug, migrant and human trafficking; the ‘Law Against Domestic Violence (1997)’ and the reform in this Act in 2014 that democratized access to public information for all women in Honduras; etc. The Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women adopted in 1994 is an important convention that laid the foundation of the role of State responsibility to address this issue. This convention has been adopted and ratified by around 32 out of the 33 Latin American countries. This convention calls for the “establishment of mechanisms for protecting and defending women’s rights as essential to combating the phenomenon of violence against women’s physical, sexual, and psychological integrity, and has played an essential role in prevention and eradication of this issue.” There are many other important international humanitarian laws and conventions which work for prevention of violence against women such as Article 27 of Geneva Convention IV (1949) which states, “Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault”; Article 7(1)(g) of ICC Statute (1998) which states, “[r]ape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity” constitutes a crime against humanity “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack”, etc. Even though a number of plans and policies have been implemented to resolve this issue, but due to reasons like corrupt government and inefficient policies, many of these plans remained on paper and were not implemented properly.
Conclusion and Suggestion
The social issue of violence against women is a serious public issue that requires immediate attention and collective action. The issue is comparatively graver in Latin American because of economic backwardness, political instability, and the prevalence of machismo ways of thinking. Women in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer from a number of issues such as femicide, domestic violence, torture during the civil war, and dictatorship regimes and economic and familial restrictions that do not let them prosper and become independent. They also suffer from sexual violence, rape, sexual assault, while young girls face incest, forced prostitution, and rape and sexual assault by their brothers, fathers, and uncles. Even though a number of steps are taken to resolve this issue, it still persists because of reasons such as the dominance of patriarchal norms of the society, corruption in the law-making agencies, and political inefficiency of the governments of Latin American Countries.
The initiatives of conventions such as Geneva Convention (1949) and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women adopted in 1994 should be supported and promoted. There is a need to make the implementation of these policies and humanitarian laws independent of the political condition of the country and proper allocation of resources towards the implementation of these plans and policies, bring a change in the ideological beliefs and thinking of the male dominant society in Latin America so as to ensure equality and empowerment of women.
This article has been authored by Raghav Sehgal, a student of Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab.